Here In My Car...

This is what I've got on the 6-stacker CD player in the car at the moment. Not a bad sequence of albums.

Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan

why it was initially disappointing but is now growing on me

Look closely at the front cover. Let your eyes go out of focus a little bit. Could you do what the young woman in the record shop did when she saw me purchasing this album? Could you exclaim "Oohhhh, that old Dr Who has a CD out?" I suppose not.

This 1967 double album, the first two-record set release by a major rock artist, is something of a wine-dark sea, running a disappointing gamut from the dirge-like ragtime of Rainy Day Women to the novelty-song-only Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat. In between, there are some good, but not great songs, like Stuck Inside of Mobile and Juat Like A Woman. But even the pretty good songs like Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands are ponderous and overlong.

So even though it's regarded as a classic, and is 9th on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of all Time list, don't let that fool you. It's really for fans only. I suppose you'll have to count me in with that lot because bugger me but it hangs together quite well after a few listens.

Led Zeppelin II: Led Zeppelin

how I'd forgotten what a great album this was

Alright, I'm still a rock snob. But not nearly as much as I used to be. Back then, I'd go out of my way to downplay this album, and the even more popular Led Zeppelin IV. The true rock snob, you see, will inevitably elevate the lesser works of great artists over their better-known classics. So where Led Zeppelin are concerned, it's their eponymous debut album and Led Zeppelin III that get all the rock-snob praise.

And after not having listened to this album in its entirety for well over thirty years, my vestigial rock snobbery had convinced me that it wasn't any good. Wrong. Dead wrong. This 1969 release is a great album that combines Led Zeppelin's blues credentials with the heavier spheres they were taking rock into on the ubiquitous Whole Lotta Love, Heartbreaker, Living Loving Maid, The Lemon Song and Bring It On Home. And just a dash of English-folk-inspired balladry as well on What Is And What Should Never Be, Thank You and Ramble On.

And here's a tip - try to imagine the impact it would have had if you were hearing it for the first time back when it was first released. That makes it even more mind-blowing.

American Beauty: Grateful Dead

how you can like an album a lot, even in spite of itself

They're an elusive lot, the Grateful Dead. Their archetypal psychedelic album, Anthem of the Sun (1967), is something of a stinker but this 1970 release seemed to be pretty highly regarded. So I bought it and immediately felt I'd been taken to the cleaners. It's country rock of the type that all of the old psychedelic acts seemed to be making around the 1969-70 period.

But on first listen, it was just too cornpone, and at the same time phoney, like they were cashing in on a fad. And then I kept listening. And grew to appreciate it.

During the recording of American Beauty, Jefferson Airplane, CSNY and the New Riders of the Purple Sage were all using Wally Heider's studio complex and the Dead took a little comfort from all of them to infuse this album with its unmistakeable feel.

The opening track, Robert Hunter and Phil Lesh's Box of Rain is just a beautiful song. And the rest of the album flows nicely from there. With plenty of pedal-steel and mandolin. The country-rock flavour is more rootsy than what other acts in that pantheon like say, Neil Young were producing at that time, so I think it's probably a bit less accessible.

The cover contains an ambigram - you can read the title lettering as American Beauty or American Reality - wow!

Burn: Deep Purple

I am nothing if not self- indulgent

I would probably not like this 1974 album, the first from a new Purple lineup, all that much if not for one thing: the singing of the new guys - vocalist David Coverdale and bassist Glenn Hughes. There are a number of songs where they share lines in a call-and-answer type way and the counterpoint their two very complementary voices provides is quite thrilling.

The title track is a riff-driven, first-growling, then screaming classic. Might Just Take Your Life and Lay Down Stay Down both rock right out, putting Hughes up front with Coverdale. And let's not forget Mistreated, another Blackmore masterwork.

I don't think this album will do for everyone, though - it's an indulgence of mine, or at least the part of me that still thinks tight pants and shoulder length hair and the music that tends to go with them, are really cool. Funny thing, the mastering makes this a very loud album. I usually have to turn the volume down a couple of notches when it comes on. But not always.

So What: Joe Walsh

I didn't think he'd be a "Best of only" guy, and he's not

I bought The Best of Joe Walsh when I was about 17 and thought it might be about all I'd need from this guitar slinger. Look how wrong you can be.

I've always been an admirer of Joe's guitar playing (a languid-sounding kind of pyrotechnics) and his singing grows on you in a Dylanesque kind of way. The definitive version of the classic Turn To Stone appears here, as do other Walsh live staples as Time Out and Help Me Through The Night.

A few of his soon-to-be bandmates from the Eagles sing backup, and the album showcases the variety of influences Joe Walsh has always brought into play.

But if you skip the drunken All Night Laundromat Blues, I'll understand.

Stripped: Rolling Stones

why I wouldn't ever dare disparage these guys

This 1995 album is just superb, and I'm the kind of Rolling Stones fan who still refers to Ronnie Wood as "the new guy" after 35 years. There should also be a DVD - bugger me it was shown on TV in about 1996 - but the Stones are nothing if not enigmatic about DVD releases - the 1968 Rock 'n' Roll Circus wasn't released until 1996 and 1974's Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones has only just made it into the shops.

The title is a play on the "unplugged" phenomenon, which was just about running its race by this time. But it isn't The Stones Unplugged, or even playing stripped-down versions of their hits at all. No, this is very much a beefed-up Stones from what live audiences had come to expect from them.

You see, the Rolling Stones have always stripped down many of their songs into loose arragements of the original for their concerts. Mick Jagger sometimes seems to be phoning it in, slurring further his already slurred drawl. And then they're also the kind of band you need to be hearing on a good night, too. During the same Voodoo Lounge Tour that produced this offering, I saw their second show at the MCG and was very pleasantly surprised at how good they were.

But for this album, they revamped the set-list for boutique live shows and recorded some less well-known early songs like Spider And The Fly and I'm Free live in the studio. The result is, put simply, the Stones as you've probably always wanted them to be.

The opening Street Fighting Man has much of the feel of the original studio recording restored and on Angie and Wild Horses they've gone to some lengths to come up with exciting guitar arrangements that are faithful but still varied enough to make you sit up and take notice of what Keith Richard and Ron Wood are doing. This applies across the whole album as they take a lot of care over Let It Bleed and Sweet Virginia.

But there's a standout - they do a sensational cover of Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone!

I won't kid you - this is the kind of album sequence that makes me look forward to driving. And has me jumping in the car on the slightest pretext.

Repartee

TLOML's maiden name is Italian. In the Sicilian dialect from the area her dad comes from, it translates as box, or casket. But over most of the Italian peninsula it means protective head covering. This includes hoods, welding masks and helmets, particularly bicycle helmets.

She gets annoyed when I mention this. And if the three stooges want to have a little fun at her expense, they'll use her maiden name when talking about helmets or any kind of safety headgear.

Now, my family name is Scottish and Irish, and translates as someone engaged to establish or maintain a garden.

So when Curly informed us this morning that he needed a new bicycle helmet, TLOML thought for a moment and decided they'd better go get one tonight after school.

So I told Curly, "You couldn't be in better hands, y'know. If anyone's going to know how to get you a great bike helmet, it's the former TLOML Bike Helmet herself."

This got three big laughs. And a fourth, if you also count me laughing at my own wit.

"Yes, and it's lucky I actually live up to my name, as opposed to dad, who is useless in the garden despite having the near-perfect name for it."

This got even louder laughs. I didn't feel disposed towards helping the cackfest along any.

"You nailed me", was the best I could come up with as I slunk out the front door.

Things I Just Never Took To I: Horse Racing

Over at The Scrivener's Fancy a while ago, Tony Martin wrote a piece covering ‘Things That Everyone Else Is Into, But Which I Have No Interest In’. Have a read of it, sure. Just don't go on and on about how much funnier his article was than this one, alright?

This series is not one of those Grumpy Old Men-style rants about all of the things that piss me off. Fucking hell, you'd be here all night! No, this is more a list of things I just never took to. Things I feel a barely-disguised, hostile neutrality towards. Like Sweden's approach to Germany during WWII. Like every first date looked at me. I think we've gone about as far as we can go with the metaphors.
Horse Racing:
It used to annoy the absolute bejesus out of my 13-year old self that I had to endure every race form the Saturday Melbourne race meetings while I was waiting for the World of Sport Football Panel to come onto our black and white TV. Racing was a blocker. I'd made a half-arsed attempt to convince myself that I could get into it when the 50c mum put on Rain Lover for the 1969 Melbourne Cup paid $1.65 for a place.

But later that year, joining schoolmates from St Brendan's PS helping out at local stables in Flemington made me aware that horses put out a lot of shit. And the universal method of cleaning out their stalls was to do it with your bare hands and not complain. I wondered if a lot of horsy girls didn't have that piss-their-pants fixation with horses drop away completely at about the same point in the journey.

And it's not like there was any tyranny of distance, either. I grew up close to Moonee Valley, played football and cricket for the clubs that also bear that name, and include among my contemporaries many with a keen appreciation and significant weekly investments in the Sport of Kings. And for the last 22 years, Flemington Racecourse has been at the end of my street, for fuck's sake. Spring Racing Carnival? I'm almost oblivious to it. Hell, a lot of people who go are oblivious to it.But do I actively dislike it? Well, no. But I do have one issue. It bothers me not a jot that rich, famous people have it so much better than everyone else. There's an extent to which I even think that's as it should be. Just in case I'm ever rich and famous. But I don't like the way the Spring Racing Carnival, and its press coverage, is so insistent about rubbing our noses in it. That's all.

All Roads Lead To Rome - Eventually

As most of you know, I work in the city. And I don't mind the daily train trip in and out, going from Newmarket inbound on the Craigieburn Line, to Flagstaff Station on the Underground Loop in the morning, and then out the same way in the afternoon.
I leave work at around 5pm, which puts me on time for the 5:14 to Craigieburn. And if the 5:14 is too jam-packed to get on, which happens around once a week, the 5:22 is usually okay. But not always. Sometimes the 5:22 is just as crowded and then I'm stuffed. Because the next two Craigieburn trains run express between Kensington and Moonee Ponds, which means Newmarket is by-passed so those trains are effectively no good to me.

And it shits me. There must be a solution... wait! I think I've got it!

Craigieburn trains are interspersed with Sydenham and Upfield Line trains, all of which stop at North Melbourne. So if I get on a Sydenham or Upfield train arriving at Flagstaff before the next Crigieburn train, I can get out at North Melbourne and walk up and then down the ramps to the Craigieburn Line platform. Even if that train is jam-packed, there are stacks of people who disembark at North Melbourne to hook up with Williamstown and Werribee Line Trains. So no matter how chocka that Craigieburn line train was to begin with, I can always get on at North Melbourne.

I never have to miss a train home again! Ever!

Period of daily train travel taken to arrive at this stunningly simple course of action? 2.25 years.

Draw your own conclusions. But I'm on the verge of working out where babies come from too.

Classic Albums Augmented I: Rubber Soul

Over at The Rising Storm, Len Liechti compared the varied track listing of the two versions (UK & US) of the Rolling Stones' 1966 Aftermath album and concluded that "it’s always fun, if ultimately pointless, trying retrospectively to construct the perfect album by arguing what should have been added or left off".

Pointless fun? Sounds like a great idea. Let's do it.

But pardon me if what I'm about to say appears sacrilegious. This series of posts is just a matter of having a look at a few notable albums and how they might have differed via the addition of contemporaneous singles. Some would have been enhanced, others would have been left with their status unchanged. And in one case, a less-than-ideal album just might have gone from self-indulgent failure to near-classic.

The Beatles:
Rubber Soul - Day Tripper; We Can Work It Out;

Rubber Soul has long been regarded as a fine album. It is often cited as the first album that was more than just a collection of songs. And Rolling Stone put it at Number 5, if you don't mind, on its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. So I'm not saying it's deficient in any way, just that it could have been even better.

The opening track, Paul McCartney's Drive My Car, has a contemporary feel even today with its sinewy guitar lines and urgent vocals. Three of the most poignant ballads you'll ever hear in Norwegian Wood; Michelle; and Girl are interspersed throughout the track listing. It's a litany of great Beatles' songs and you could imagine the four songs already mentioned plus probably I'm Looking Through You; In My Life; and Wait all being hit singles instead of album tracks.

There was a lot of experimentation on Rubber Soul by contemporary standards. Backwards guitar solos, the sitar on Norwegian Wood, pianos sped up to sound like harpsichords, and clear influences from India to the US West Coast. The overwhelming majority of it sounded good, which is not always the case with experimentation. There would be a lot more of this on the next two albums from the fab four, Revolver and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band but Rubber Soul laid the bedrock for it.

And if you were listening to this on its first release, you might have pondered for a moment why the almost simultaneous December 1965 double-A side single release Day Tripper and We Can Work It Out didn't make it onto the album. But back in 1965, it's likely you would have bought the single anyway.

Day Tripper opens with one of the most recognizable guitar riffs in rock music and is a beautifully structured song. It's mainly a John Lennon-composed song, but one where Paul McCartney contributed the verses and sings lead vocal during the verse. Essentially a 12-bar, the Beatles had to do something to make their contribution to that form stand out. They do it by transferring the riff to the much-higher sub-dominant for a BIG key-change. This is held in a jam-like middle-8 while the vocals and guitars ascend to a crescendo that leads very deftly back to the riff.

McCartney's singing is a pure throat-shredding scream (lots of luck nailing that one, cover bands) and as with their very best songs, all vocalists can be heard distinctly through the harmonizing. This was one of those great times when a huge hit was also a seminal moment in rock history.

We Can Work It Out shifts in and out of 4/4 and 3/4 time, and sounds quaint with John Lennon's harmonium being a distinctive feature of the song. Like Day Tripper, this is another rare collaboration, with verses by McCartney and a chorus and middle-8 by John Lennon. The vocals are earnest and convincing, and switch back and forth between optimisim and pessimism. The Beatles had argued over which of the two songs on the single should be the A-side and so this record became the first-ever double A-side. However, it was We Can Work It Out which proved the more popular in airplay.

So Which Tracks Would Miss Out?
On an album with 14 tracks? None, not even the Ringo song, What Goes On. And the length of the album would stay under the LP limit of 45 min, with two great additions to the track listing.